Probably because of too much abuse, and VC is still a good signal to avoid that.
On the other side, startups can get equivalent of 150K azure credits for less than $3K with Hetzner :p
Now all the big three cloud providers (amazon, microsoft, google) have moved away from supporting startups without investor affiliations. This weakens the bootstrap landscape and gives even more power to investors (like YC) over startup success which means less founder diversity. A sad reality. Even more when you think about that most investors have stopped investing in B2C. YC is a joke at this point.
Microsoft for Startups is making a major change effective June 30th, 2025. The previous credit tiers that allowed unfunded startups to access up to $150k of credits has been replaced with a new program that includes two tiers:
* Startups with an investor affiliate receive Azure credits starting at a value of $100k
* Startups without an investor affiliate receive up to $5k of Azure credits.
Prior to this change the tiers a startup could access were:
L1- $1000
L2- $5000
L3- $25,000
L4- $150,0000
We were given 25k in Azure credits, along with 100k from AWS and 350k from Google.
The microsoft one has been the worst experience by far. No GPU availability, couldnt even get one despite many attempts in many regions. They have two different billing dashboards always out of sync. They accidently billed 11k to our company card and getting it back was a nightmare of talk to X in Y department. The rep assigned to us simply didnt care, and scheduled frequent monthly updates with us but them just tried to get off the call as fast as possible.
Compare with AWS and Google, we have been invited to poker nights with them, they have been attentive in helping us get customers, they get us GPUs when we need them (recently an H200), they connect us with internal teams and they take the interest and go the extra mile.
Azures technical infra is so cut down and restricted it took us a month of nagging just to get a 32 core, CPU only server, which frequently became unresponsive even when not under load.
Bad experience all around, it became quite a joke internally.
This was our experience too. I don’t know how Microsoft gets anything done, their systems were just buggy, poorly documented chaos for us.
We had a boat load of credits, an existing codebase/system we were just trying to move from AWS, and even tried to use their “expert mentor” service or whatever it was called. Their expert had zero knowledge and was immediately clear that they were worse at reading their own docs than us.
Never trying Azure again, and I’d like my wasted hours back please.
Probably because of too much abuse, and VC is still a good signal to avoid that. On the other side, startups can get equivalent of 150K azure credits for less than $3K with Hetzner :p
Now all the big three cloud providers (amazon, microsoft, google) have moved away from supporting startups without investor affiliations. This weakens the bootstrap landscape and gives even more power to investors (like YC) over startup success which means less founder diversity. A sad reality. Even more when you think about that most investors have stopped investing in B2C. YC is a joke at this point.
Microsoft for Startups is making a major change effective June 30th, 2025. The previous credit tiers that allowed unfunded startups to access up to $150k of credits has been replaced with a new program that includes two tiers:
* Startups with an investor affiliate receive Azure credits starting at a value of $100k * Startups without an investor affiliate receive up to $5k of Azure credits.
Prior to this change the tiers a startup could access were: L1- $1000 L2- $5000 L3- $25,000 L4- $150,0000
We were given 25k in Azure credits, along with 100k from AWS and 350k from Google.
The microsoft one has been the worst experience by far. No GPU availability, couldnt even get one despite many attempts in many regions. They have two different billing dashboards always out of sync. They accidently billed 11k to our company card and getting it back was a nightmare of talk to X in Y department. The rep assigned to us simply didnt care, and scheduled frequent monthly updates with us but them just tried to get off the call as fast as possible.
Compare with AWS and Google, we have been invited to poker nights with them, they have been attentive in helping us get customers, they get us GPUs when we need them (recently an H200), they connect us with internal teams and they take the interest and go the extra mile.
Azures technical infra is so cut down and restricted it took us a month of nagging just to get a 32 core, CPU only server, which frequently became unresponsive even when not under load.
Bad experience all around, it became quite a joke internally.
This was our experience too. I don’t know how Microsoft gets anything done, their systems were just buggy, poorly documented chaos for us.
We had a boat load of credits, an existing codebase/system we were just trying to move from AWS, and even tried to use their “expert mentor” service or whatever it was called. Their expert had zero knowledge and was immediately clear that they were worse at reading their own docs than us.
Never trying Azure again, and I’d like my wasted hours back please.